They sponsored the development of a new book called Cloud Data Warehousing for Dummies. Yup, an actual Dummies guide for this. And yes, yours truely, got to have a hand in editing and writing the book.

Researching and helping to write the book was very educational for me. I learned a lot in the process about what constitutes a cloud data warehouse, the difference between a platform in the cloud and a real service in the cloud, and what characteristics folks should look for when choosing one.

I also learned to say “on-premises” instead of “on-premise.” 🙂

Content

The chapters of the book cover:

An introduction to cloud data warehousing

Why the modern data warehouse emerged

The criteria for selecting a modern data warehouse

On-premises vs cloud data warehousing

Comparing cloud data warehousing solutions

A six-step guide to choosing a cloud data warehouse

It also includes several real-world customer case studies.

Even though Snowflake sponsored the book, it is vendor agnostic. It really is a book designed to get you introduced to the concepts and to get you thinking about what you might want in a cloud-based data warehousing system.

It is ideal for anyone who is considering making that transition to the cloud.

The team at Oracle went all out this year and produced three (yes three) pre-release versions to make sure all the fixes and new features were rock solid before they called it production.

That is a lot of testing and work.

But worth the effort – they fixed piles of bugs and added dozens of new features.

Oracle product manager Jeff Smith (@thatjeffsmith) has already published several articles highlighting his favorite new features. Check out what he has to say here then go download the new version and give it try.

Let me know what you your favorite new feature is.

Merry Christmas!

The Oracle Christmas Elf

(Kent)

P.S. Without proven methods and standards, even the best tool will not insure you build the best model, so why not increase your chances by giving yourself the gift of knowledge by picking up a copy of my data model checklist book (on sale for a few more hours).

My good friend Dan (@dlinstedt) has put together a sweet set of three videos to introduce everyone to the wonderful world of Data Vault.

When you sign up you will get a set of email messages from Dan discussing the Data Vault Approach to data warehousing. You get access to three videos about the architecture, the methodology, and the modeling technique.

Plus you get free downloads of the first few chapters of the data vault book Super Charge Your Data Warehouse.

So if you have always wanted to learn more about Data Vault, but don’t have the budget for a full on class, this offer will get you headed in the right direction.